MindMaps

14 June 2010

My friend and microbusiness partner Jeremy is a well-rounded guy. He has a few consulting clients that give him the income he needs to get by and maybe a little more. But that doesn't take up all his time. In his spare time he's also dancer, and with his wife and a few friends is opening a Montessori school. But that doesn't take up all his time, so he worked with two other guys and myself to create iKan, the Personal Kanban iPhone app. But that doesn't take up all his time either, so he got together with a bunch of other guys and created Crowdmap an awesome shared mind mapping tool for the iPad.

So Jeremy is, as I said, my microbusiness partner. iKan is a microbusiness. The application has helped many people take their Personal Kanban with them when they are away from their home or office. But it's also only $4.99. With four partners, it would take a very long time for any of us to become wealthy from it.

But what I'm noticing is this: The new entrepeneurs the media keeps touting are not out building companies with just sweat equity. That is nothing new and completely misses the point of the transformation that is taking place.

The previous career models of "I'm going to get a stable job and go to the office every day" or "I'm going to launch a startup and we're going to become huge and make millions" are increasingly viewed as the self-defeating, zero-sum games that they are. People are recognizing that full time-work is fleeting; that at-will employment means you have no job security. And hopping from job to job is stressful and forces you to give up all self-control.

Instead, people are collecting portfolio projects with residuals that, over time, will result in reliable income streams. This is a vital distinction, because when you have a huge time-sucking job with no hope of residuals, every hour you spend working is worth a set amount – regardless of how much effort you put in or how much value you create.

This means that trade-offs between the rest of your life and work will always fall in favor of work. If your boss tells you to work until midnight during your daughter’s recital, you need to work. If you don’t, the zero-sum game means you lose disproportionately to the cost of the action. Going to the recital will always lose to not having a job and health insurance. But the action that night at work compared to your daughter’s recital? That individual trade off was likely in favor of your daughter.

Building a portfolio of microbusinesses with an underpinning of paid project work means you are building both good short and long term income opportunities. For a portfolio holder, the option of working that evening or spending quality time with your daughter will, appropriately, come down on the side of the daughter – and if it doesn’t, it will be because the trade-off was really worth it.

So Jeremy and others I know are placing themselves in a position where they can exercise life’s options with the least amount of external costs. This allows them to build not only a portfolio of projects they have worked on, but also greatly expands the portfolio of projects they canwork on. In doing this, Jeremy and others have bought themselves a great deal of freedom.

The next time you think about work/life balance, consider this: have I placed myself in a position where I pay a penalty for choosing activities outside of work? Have I placed a tariff on my own happiness? Have I left myself unable to work on projects that will make me money, expand my capabilities, and provide an interesting challenge? How many of my options have I closed off?

22 June 2008

This week I was the closing keynote speaker at the Nlab Social Networks conference in Leicester. My talk was entirely based on preconceived and spontaneous concept maps created with IHMC's Cmap Tools.

While my talking was marginally popular, people were genuinely impressed with concept maps as a basis for storytelling.

Regular readers of this blog have seen dozens of posts that directly use concept maps along side the posts. Like here and here.

I was very happy with how speaking directly from a concept map kept the audience engaged, the presentation flowing and broke away from powerpoints.

And, no, it's not that I hate powerpoint. I make pretty good PPTs, if you ask me.

What I noticed was the concept map created a flow for the conversation that was even and had no breaks. With powerpoint, every new slide is an abrupt transition. It also creates an unhealthy distraction of "What's coming next?" as opposed to an easy anticipation that you are already in the flow of the logic and the next thing, while unknown, will be natural. (Which does not preclude being surprising).

When I showed my wife my presentation she became quite animated. "YOU SHOULD USE THIS EVERY DAY!!" She shouted. She, as a clinician, really liked the logical flow of the concept map and how it helped a "big picture" guy like myself organize thought.

The issue here is, I have so many things running around in my head that powerpoints don't provide the structure I apparently need to remind me to say details. Or, if powerpoint does do this - it's because of tedious bullet points.

CMaps create transit networks of thought. So each bit of an overall concept is like a station. You move along through the network and stop and each station to see the sites. The photo above shows that my concept map has a main-line and a few branches. And in the end, they are a coherent system.

31 December 2007

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking. Rules, rules, rules. Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules. Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post. Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his. Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse. (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet. If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing. You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy. You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are. It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories. But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools. Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application. Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches. In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites. A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it. I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates. The cohort of friendliness is honesty. Every list talked about transparency in one form or another. Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical. The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two. You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services. You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld. You need to participate, you need to facilitate. You have to show up for your own party. Communities grow, so you need to nourish them. Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything. Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17. This post has links to the other additions.

05 May 2007

My friend and colleagues Brad Degraf and Jon Ramer teamed up to get me into MindMeister, on on-line mind mapping tool with a bunch of great features. I'll do a How-to on this later, after I've used it a bit.

But for now, I wanted to review it.

Here is a map I did for this article:

So the first nice thing is that you can embed a mind map into your blog posts quite easily. (We'll see how it survives feeds though). You merely select "export", copy the code. and drop it into your post.

Sharing with friends is just is easy. Simply invite someone you need to collaborate with to MindMeister and share the mindmap with them.

You can select between "viewers" who can see your mind maps or collaborators who can actively edit the mindmaps.

You can also import or export to your favorite mind map programs, including Freemind and Mindmanager.

The controls are similar to both Freemind and MindManager. Insert starts a new node in the next level, enter creates a new node in the same level, etc.

17 November 2006

Yesterday I posted about wanting to map mental journeys - map movements through information and cyberspace. I'm not quite there yet. But this is the first step.

Any map generally provides a set of wayfinding points - explicit or implicit and a set of instructions. For example, here's how to get from the Pan Pacific Hotel to Seasons in the Park restaurant in Vancouver BC, via a story.

And here's a map

So, yesterday I told the (verbose) story of this map:

As we can see, this map is sort of a hybrid. If provides both the concepts and the context. It isn't as strict a visualization as the mapquest map is. The mapquest map however, does rely on non-visual cues for the reader. The map has street names, park names and "Start / End".

But what the maps allow one to do is quickly trace the flow of information from the start to the end of the story. While the Concept Map relies heavily on words, it is not nearly as verbose. You can very quickly trace the main concepts of the story in yesterday's post.

Now, the key to this cartography is that the geography is reliant on how I framed my own story or my argument. This is the map through my journey beginning at the intersection of Kevin Lynch and Peter Morville.

Maps, even those of merely land formations, always are in dispute. The map is not the terrain, as the quote goes. The terrain will always be open to interpretation (there's that word again). So all maps are visualizations and interpretations.

The concept map is not quite visual enough for me - but visualization techniques are complex and varied. I would imagine that there will be no set way to create a map of this conceptual terrain. Just as I can make you any number of maps of physical terrain (street maps, topographic maps, riparian maps).

With GIS, I overlay stories on physical maps. These can be heat maps, impact maps, movement maps, and so forth. As information needs to be digested quickly, maps can be simplified and as they are simplified they are more interpretive.

Here's a map-based application we did to show real-time traffic for MTC in the Bay Area. This is the traffic.511.org web site.

As you can see from this zoomed image, the map is somewhat simplified. Not quite a schematic, but not entirely showing every curve in the Bay Area freeway system. Our goal was to provide a highly readable map that didn't over-simplify and leave out visual cues for the locations of given congestion.

Another interesting thing here is the choice of symbology and colors to depict information. Here at the evening rush hour, we can see that there are bad and good parts in the familiar red / yellow / green color bands we've been raised on. Red = stop to yellow = slow to green = go is now an international color progression.

But what if you can't see the difference between red and green? The system provides a variety of color schemes to compensate for color blindness of macular degeneration.

This map is immediately bizarre to most people, but to people with red/green color blindness it is vital. And that's part of their story. By looking at this map now, we are getting even the slightest, strangest glimpse into the world of color blindness - simply through this visualization tool.

So maps can provide insights that might otherwise elude us. They provide alternate vocabularies with which to express ourselves. Stories are vital but there is more than one way to tell them. Here's an example:

STORY

There's a woman sitting. She's slightly smiling and kinda attractive in a forlorn sort of way. You're left wondering exactly what sort of mood she's in. Somewhere between happy and sad. Maybe feeling a touch of ennui. She watches the horizon for something unspoken.

MAP

Now, granted, my prose could have been better. And if the Mona Lisa had been written as a poem that may have been different. But it wasn't.

Next I will work on getting the CMap maps to be interactive. I seem to be having some trouble getting on their servers. I'd love to have a dialog with anyone who has ideas of interesting ways to visualize this. I'd also like it if people would send me links to any visualization tools out there and I'll start mapping stories in them and compare.

19 August 2006

I had a curious experience last night. I went to a party at my friend Jon Ramer's house and I had a lot on my mind. Everyone at the party was well acquainted with each other and I was well acquainted with my wife. So I was keeping my wife company and working out a lot of things in my head and not really integrating with the party.

But most things with Jon are about community. His parties are no different. His new house has a bizarre little quirk - a viewport from a landing which serves nicely as an impromptu stage. Now, it is safe to say that Jon is a "save the world" type. So everyone was invited to stand at the little stage and talk about how they might, in some little way, "Save the World."

It's been years since I've been consciously trying to save the world.

So I was musing about my days with The Names Project and wishing that I could talk about that as part of my present. But, in the end, I got up and gave an impromptu story about being with the NAMES Project. It was well outside where my headspace was about 10 minutes before that, and my delivery showed. But the thing that was interesting was the NAMES Project story opened a rapidly developing map where I asked myself "Well, how did I get here?"

13 August 2006

"Make no small plans: They have no magic to stir men's blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; Aim high in hope, and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once located will not die."

This week's mind map is about how we as a society have been reduced to small, shortsighted plans. I am breaking from tradition to talk about politics - or at least the structure of current American politics. I believe that our current system is unsustainable and is structurally flawed. That this system leads to such small and shortsighted plans. And that we, as a community or a group of communities reflect this dynamic in our lack of commitment, direction and vision.

Big Brother is Big Business

All businesses have, or should have mission statements. Mission statements help orient the activities of the business by providing an easy-to-grasp micro-vision of what the organization stands for. The two political parties in the US are no different.

As an organization grows, the ability to boil down the organization's ethic into a single sentence or paragraph becomes more and more difficult. As a result, they become more and more vague. For example, here is the Procter & Gamble mission statement:

We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers. As a result,consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit, and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders, and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.

So too is it for the two political parties. Their vague missions have become so difficult to define that neither party even attempts to do so. Neither party's web site has any type of mission statement. Both pick a few (about 10) issues to discuss on the sites and both include the party platform (See PR below) to serve as proxies for what they might stand for.

These mission statements / issue statements are carefully crafted on both sites to balance the other party. Never being too far away from what the other party believes, but far enough to bicker about it. This is key to a duopoly. In the US, we take pride in our freely elected governing bodies. These bodies are justified by the concept of choice. We choose to elect certain individuals. So if either party became too powerful or, conversely, died, we would have a political monopoly - which would destroy our choice. So both parties rely heavily on the existence of their loyal opposition.

Given that the first duty of any organism is to survive, the parties have naturally become bound to a dysfunctional but supportive marital relationship. And this fragile ecosystem has worked fairly well for 200 years, but has experienced entropy. As information flows more freely, as people become inured to scandal, as the vision of particular elected officials becomes shorter and shorter, the long term sustainability of this ecosystem is being damaged. As it is damaged, the quality of governance we receive declines.

As these forces work, we see the loyalty of elected officials being governed more and more by the parties themselves. We see increasingly more party-line votes every year, meaning we are seeing less free thinking, compromise, or thoughtful decision making. Given that the parties overall self-concepts are so vague as to not be able to engender even a mission statement, it seems unlikely that all party members would be inclined to vote party line with such frequency. This is a strong indicator that electeds are voting not with their conscience but via fiat.

The system itself sustains this behavior. You can't "get things done" in Washington without playing within the system. Getting things done equates to keeping your job and power - sustaining the system becomes the same as sustaining yourself. Ideology still plays a part. Both sides of the isle have genuine disdain for the other party - like Yankees fans have disdain for Red Sox fans. They have ideological elements to point to. "I can't lose my seat and let them take X away from Y." But, in the end, X and Y are about 1/1,000,000th of the daily activities of the government. The electeds themselves become blinded by their self-created wedge issues.

Protecting the increasingly conceptual America, then becomes protecting them from the other party's vision of proper governance of these 9 or 10 wedge issues important enough to make it to the parties' web sites. And thus, less than a dozen issues end up framing our entire political debate while we all ignore everything else the government should be doing and what we should be doing to support our society.

Talkin' 'bout Public Relations

The age of PR is rapidly dying and PR people are rushing to keep up. Blogging and democratized conversation tools, and both political parties have shown signs of utter chaos in the wake.

When you have a diffused product, you sell it by creating a PR or advertising campaign that surgically selects certain elements that you can focus on. Tide is great at making your clothes cleaner and really difficult to remove from your waste water at the treatment plant. So ads are going to focus on clean clothes and not even hint at toxicity.

The political parties can only sell their product by having a focal point. But politics does not clean your clothes. We are now all predisposed to distrust the personalities involved. So, they cannot really focus too much on their solutions. The 9 or 10 issues are so complicated that no one is going to trust or be satisfied with a specific solution set.

Therefore, we are left with negative campaigning. "My opponent is 27% less trustworthy than I am!"

Then end result of this is disenfranchisement of the intelligent electorate and a stronger push to voting party line. The people, as you move forward, matter less and less. They are automatons that have a (D) or (R) next to them.

If it's assumed that most of the people who still participate at the voting booth are voting for your parenthetical and not for you, you are more likely to "play to your base". Which means your speeches are geared not to what you might think as a thoughtful person, but to what your party has told you is important to say.

You are to stay on-message. The "party-line" as it were. Ape the party platform. A platform designed to carefully differentiate the parties, not to allow thoughtful governance.

Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail

The current system guarantees that long term planning will always suffer for short term gain. Political expediency is now paramount because no one (elected or otherwise) has a level of comfort that would come with a long-term vision.

This directionless movement means that our infrastructure, both social and capital, is planned and maintained via expediency. The 800 pound gorilla in our public systems is that we don't maintain anything. Government money is spent almost entirely on construction projects. This is why we have new highways and decaying bridges.

It is not politically attractive to fix something that's already there. It is politically attractive to build new things that people will admire.

Our elected officials need the steroid injections of highly visible public works projects or, conversely, of killing projects elsewhere and crowing over the reduction of "porkbarrel projects". The game is to improve areas under your party's control and remove projects from the other side. The vision is not to make a better or safer country - even if such rhetoric is used to support projects in your area.

Spending is an obvious outgrowth of this. We are spending at an uncontrollable rate. We have gone from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the largest debtor nation in 4 short years. The fact that we've done this while the party largely considered to be fiscally conservative controls all three branches of government is a strong indication that spending is not a party issue - it's a control issue.

The best way in a two party system to control spending is to have control of the branches split between the parties so their in-fighting will keep the country from over-spending. Note that this isn't saying the planning will be better, it just inhibits them from getting into too much trouble.

Divide and Conquer

No genius is required to realize that when people feel disenfranchised they are less likely to take part in their community. We've managed to help out voter disenfranchisement through bad urban design and a host of other short-term plans, certainly, but the party system can be seen on its own.

When 9 or 10 issues are all that divide us, but they divide us so vehemently, cooperation and community are difficult to achieve. We fall to more and more narrowly defined notions of community and blame the wider issues on people not in our narrowly defined communities.

We begin to believe that community = homogeneity. That groups we belong to must conform to our every mindset. Even though we know this isn't possible or even desirable. But we've been told that these issues are so important and that others who think differently are so evil that we become scared of conversation, debate or human contact.

Conclusion

Community is ultimately divided, confused and diffused by these activities. And the worst of it, this is not a system with a purpose. While it's obvious what's going on, no one feels empowered to stop it. Not the President of United States or the Leaders of the two parties. This situation is a natural outgrowth of a system based on two parties that have no competition. The sad fact is there may be nothing to stop these ill effects from happening.

22 July 2006

I'm not just waxing nostalgic for Zines, there are many ways where blogging is far far superior to zines. These come in expense, audience, accessibility to news, searchability, and tools.

Expense

Blogspot and many other sites will give you a free blogging site. Free. You can go to a library or some coffee shops and get on line for free. Free. You can blog for free.

Sometimes, BVI-Central was free because I copied it at an office that made allowances for my "cool zine". But that was rare. Even with the free copying, I still had to shell out for stamps. At $150 a year, the cost to host this blog with premium services at TypePad is less than two BVI-Central issues.

So the fiscal barrier to entry for blogs is much lower for the blog author.

Audience and Searchability

BVI-Central was sold via world of mouth or through Factsheet Five. That viral distribution worked fairly well at the time, but would be a dismal failure now.

I have hundreds of subscribers to the RSS feeds on my blog and have a large number coming every day via a wide and growing array of audience intermediaries like del.icio.us, Techmeme, tailrank, Digg and others.

A non-insignificant number come through search engines either blog-specific (icerocket, blogs.google.com, Technorati) or general (Ask, Google, MSN). Very very few people randomly started to read BVI.

Viral means still drive most attentive readers to this blog. So I don't think the quality of readers is necessarily diminishing from zines to blogs.

Accessibility to News (Instant Relevance)

A zine could not link. Linking is very powerful and, as I've mentioned before, is the act that truly defines blogging. As Capote might say of linkless bloggers, "That's not blogging, that's typing."

The act of linking creates community when linked to other bloggers and relevance when linked to source material. Good linking gives substance to your rants and demonstrates your writing will withstand at least some self-referenced scrutiny.

People can read your blog entry and quickly search Technorati or Google News for other writing on the subject to check up on you.

Zines beat blogs in permanence, attentive readership, thoughtful replies, editing, and the human touch. The mind map dances around these - or presents them differently.

Permanence

Zines are made of paper, which bleaches and decays, but is a lot easier to thumb through than a blog entry you read on-screen. I can take someone upstairs and say, "here's the stuff I wrote from Junior High into the early 90s."

The web based stuff is harder to touch, harder to keep track of, harder to point at. When the power goes out, it just plain doesn't exist.

Part of my starting to do these Mind Maps was that when I looked at my blog, I saw little permanence. I saw few posts that survived to the next week - because I was commenting on technology and not really writing about sustainable topics. While writing about technology was a topic choice of my own, I felt that the medium - blogging - was also introducing some of that temporal nature to the writing.

So, for me, these mind maps help introduce more permanence into my personal blogging.

Attentive Readership & Replies

Gillmor and others have written extensively about the attention economy. My last mind map touched on this as well. With Zines, I enjoyed a small (seemed big at the time) but highly engaged readership. Nearly 60% of the people that received BVI-Central would write back or make an entire zine in reply. Long, thoughtful commentary.

The precursor to Podcasting was Cassette Zines. Yes, I had one of those too. People would spend hours creating cassette zines in response to my, or others, writing.

These attentive readers led to longer, deeper and more intense discussions. I am finding that blogs give us a huge surface area of discussion, but I'm missing some of the depth.

Editing and The Human Touch

Rick Springfield needed both and so do the rest of us. I fully recognize that my blog posts go out rapidly and sometimes could use some more massaging. I used to illustrate BVI-Central with ink drawings or collages and so forth. While doing the illustrations, I would often go back and change the text - because I spent more time with it.

When you received a Zine, it had the actual physical touch of its creator. Usually their hands folded them, stapled them, their tongues licked the stamp in the corner. There was often scribbled personal notes in the corners. Even though they'd printed up 100 of them, this one was personally for you and from them.